Sixty homes in the Monmouthshire village of Llanddewi Rhydderch can now have Full Fibre to the Premise (FTTP), able to receive Ultrafast Broadband, with a choice of speeds from 100Mbps to 1Gbps – a huge technological leap forward for this ‘once forgotten’ village where speeds of less than 1Mbps were the norm.
Despite the recent extremely challenging weather, Broadway last week completed phase one of its fibre build and has now connected the first customers to the Ultrafast 100Mbps service.
Phase two of the rollout, connecting another 50 properties to the Full Fibre network, is now completing the design stage, with build due to begin by the end of the month.
Emma, resident of Llanddewi Rhydderch and Broadway’s first fibre customer in the village, says “I cannot tell you how excited I am to be getting this service, after years of struggling with really shocking broadband. And I’m so pleased for the village as a whole, as it really puts us on the map and makes me feel as if we’re ready for the future.”
Broadband is often regarded as ‘the fourth utility’, increasingly indispensable to everyday life. As digital devices become ever more sophisticated, so do the networks that carry the signals have to keep pace – and Broadway’s fibre helps ensure that Llanddewi Rhydderch’s digital future is assured for generations to come. The ‘entry level’ 100Mbps service comes with unlimited data and starts from just £24.99 a month on a 12-month contract – understood to be the cheapest Fibre-to-the-Premises deal currently on the market.
Barry Weaver, COO at Broadway, said “We are very pleased to be building fibre networks in Monmouthshire, having been working closely for some time with Monmouthshire County Council and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), developing the business and commercial case for Full Fibre in even the remotest rural areas. This is just the beginning: ‘full fibre’ is still only available across a fraction of Monmouthshire, Wales and the UK, and Broadway’s low cost, flexibility and speed of deployment put in a great position to help deliver the Government’s ambitions for ‘Gigabit Connectivity for all’ by 2025.”
Broadway also operates fixed-wireless networks across Monmouthshire, as well as in Arran, Ayrshire, Perth and Kinross and around Loch Ness. It first trialed Gigabit speeds in LLanddewi Rhydderch in February 2019 as part of the UK Government’s 5G Pilot programme, using leading-edge 60GHz ‘mesh’ technology.
Broadway plans to deliver full fibre networks to a further 50 rural communities across Monmouthshire by 2021.
